it curves, re-curves, sweeps wide at point bars, clear at riffles, murmurs in a bed of cobbles, deepens, darkens to emerald, gains velocity, cuts under heather banks, pools behind a dam of debris

and forms a placid lake…but water never hesitates long, it throngs against glacial detritus, sluices through a breach, pours toward falls, stumbling as though down disorderly stairs—

how long freefall seems,

as long as a lifetime,

the current dividing,

memory dissipating,

until particles of river

gather again in a pool,

where water calms,

remembers its shape,

then continues on, its current urgent and whole.

[ Woodrow Wilson asks ]

The grand ballroom doors swing wide to welcome daybreak, and you follow the crowd as it sweeps across the threshold and down a long staircase to a marble rotunda, and on through a candle-lit passage, where at a window you halt, hearing a tinny voice speak as from a gramophone, far down inside the cygnet horn pitched too high, and see him, “the gaunt deacon” alone in the snow on the other side, his sallow mask distorted in the leaded glass, his bespectacled eyes baggy, exhausted, all his hopes soon betrayed: You there, asleep in time, how will you make sacred ground of this, our old lost cause?

[ ten years ago at dawn ]

Dobido woke and climbed to the pass above Hobo Lake, the basin brimful with gold, a trick of wind and sunlight— water’s wrinkled foil. It took him an hour to ascend through krumholtz, pick his way around boulders, kick footholds into snow, and the barren cirque below filled with fog rolling in across tundra, swift as a god pursuing an errand on earth heralded by gusts of flurries, mouldering stench of autumn and the famine that follows.

[ two views of vagrancy ]

The hobo, whoever he was—namesake, criminal, vagrant, or holy man— herders last saw him in September 1939, running away, shy as a goat, darting from boulder to whitebark pine, until he crossed over the pass, deeper into wilderness. The hobo knew by then the many disguises worn by the one who appears at your door, the hazards of welcoming these periodic impersonations of fog, boom of thunder, squalls of snow— he'd seen it all a hundred times before abandoning this stone ring full of ashes and grown up in sedge, a hand-hewn cabin crumbled now to a rectangle of ochre dust. The hobo never returned to his austere loneliness gouged from granite by ice, but went ahead to forage the future following in the wake of gods.

[ an unruly congress ]

Why not wake him? Otherwise Dobido will wander in circles all day, following a faint silver path without any clear purpose in mind. Let him ponder how to answer that sorrowful man, peering in the window at him. Otherwise, he won’t leave the palace. He’ll pause like all the rest at the verge of 1914, blind to what’s coming—the glorious licking, the accidents of 1917. Guests whirl in formal dress across parquet floors, the halting steps of the hesitation waltz women say, insinuating more, Seem so passionate, fanning their cheeks, flushed at the neck, trying to catch their breath on the arms of officers. How to wake Dobido in time? How to answer a sorrowful man? Dobido knows neither who nor what he really is—is he just this unruly congress of voices, the nostalgias of generations whose turmoil he’s the product of, one era entangled in another? How to prepare for this time when they all have passed from one world into another filled with shadows? If they left instructions, they wrote them out in old script it’s impossible to decipher here in this desolation of stone and sky at the brink of—

[ a door ajar ]

In a palace corridor, behind a door a servant left ajar, Dobido glimpses a man—a carpenter, a coffin-maker— seated on a stool, quietly planing boards in a city armies lay siege to. The man pauses, distracted by a cold draft he feels, holds the plane blade still in the air, and then begins again planing a board lying across his knees.

[ Dobido returns]

…and it might have ended there at the shore of Hobo Lake, having misread the map and convinced myself that, by virtue of my error, the trail switchbacked toward clarity not bewilderment,

that remoteness is its own purifying event: alone at the end of summer, as baffled now as last I stood in boulders and frosted sedge at the lakeshore, present but unable to answer.

[ close that door, damn it ]

Who needs any of that insinuating itself into this recessional aubade? Almost-dawn, New Year’s 1914, the long-postponed finale of another century— the dreamer losing hold of her tiny hand, and she slipping away into the throng.

[ an exchange of letters ]

Dawn meanders west, slowly raising its gray dome over plains, and snow begins to fall into the Neman, the Vlatava, snow falling in the Vistula, the Danube, snow soft as a collar of ermine the beloved wore at the dawn of the era of the white beam and black hand, of ideals and ideas that will wear hair shirts, so wrote the patriot from Sindlesdorf to his friend in Berlin, whoever they may be in the dark we’ll feed them, not history but handfuls of grasshoppers and wild honey.

[ an idyll ]

…summer evenings, singing in a whisper that’s the voice of a woman you thought you loved

once—you could do that, imagine a virgin earth, begin again at some farther extreme, so long as you were willing to

live like a dung beetle, master hardships, call punishment purifying, you could do it, grow ferocious and remote in your mind

so people feared you and kept their distance, but not that woman inside your head, because there can be no solitude so hopeless

that the woman in your daydreams refuses to join you there, her body your refuge, a trail through gentian and fleeceflower

at the end of the alpine summer, frost-burnt sedges at the dreamer’s feet, and 10,000 toads—some still with tails,

others without, some with one leg or three or none at all—threading chaotic passages as they scurry toward what instinct says

is the safety of numbers, shallow water, warm, cloudy mud, heat sink of stone, the long slumber of winter ahead.

[ of people and mules, of trees ]

Heaven placid seven days— round-the-clock, unperturbed quiet, the late summer light stunned into stillness, odd to see sky as he never saw it before or since, that day-lit vacancy but for a ghosting quarter moon at mid-day. A pair of hunters he met on a mountain trail pointed and asked, Did you notice? this alien, soundless blue, unbroken by contrail or cloud—What happened?

He tried to explain it to a circle of people and mules under larches, the trees leaning forward, listening closely because it was their burden too, this serenity in heaven, sensing that concussive waves rippled toward them across the Appalachians, Great Plains, across the Rockies, all the way to the Pacific and beyond, the spectacular catastrophes that befall other lives.

[ a diplomat from the congress of unruly voices ]

If we’re not going to open that door, then accompany me through this one to look at pictures in another room. Here is one I like. The title translates: Ruins with Unhorsed Prophet. The boy with his back to us walks a dusty road under the arch of an ivy-covered ruin, completely unconcerned. But look, here in the corner, in the shadow below the crumbling pillar. A saddled but riderless horse looks perplexed, if you can say such a thing of a horse. Look again. Closer. There’s a lion devouring what must be a prophet. His head is already gone! Glance and it’s just a 19th century dream, derelict Orientalism, a sleepy scene, twilight of the Ottoman Empire. But it’s a provocation, too, an insult, nature’s joke whose punch line isWhere’s your God now, holy man?

And where’s the Good Samaritan in this picture of the parable? In the middle-ground, a priest walks arm-in-arm with a wealthy burgher, descending a hill. If we follow them toward the misty light that shines on the city below, we pass a man on the left, squatting behind a shrub to move his bowels—a holy recluse. Outside the tavern, another man kneels, recognizable by his clothes as a foreigner, his throat bared to a thief's knife. Exactly where in all of this is human kindness, action that takes us out of our ordinary lives, makes us worthy of the life of Christ? You’ll have to keep looking because it’s hidden, covered over by the gaudy frame— the injured man’s torso, the Samaritan bowing over the one to whose rescue he’s come. These are the victim’s feet, and these the worn soles of the shoes the Samaritan wears. It’s hard to say, given so little information. The painter knew us better six hundred years ago than we know ourselves today.

[ contra naturam ]

All night, the sound of a stream washes over Dobido’s dream, glacier melt trickling across moraine. In the east, the violet dome lifts under indigo and sky pales upward from the rim of mountains, the edge of the earth. All those obscene and profligate toads throbbing now in warm mud, the palace guests stepping back from the threshold of 1914, as though to linger longer inside the palace as evening replays in reverse. The warmth of laughter promised a future. Her laughter came last, her smile came first. She smiles and the dreamer leads her back to the dance. He wants all that once more, the smile, the woman, a dance floor in a palace in winter, encircled by forested hills, his troika skating toward her through starlight, his mind’s birthright a remote place, nature forgiving all offenses future or past, the consequences no one predicted, healed now. A future.

[ along the western front ]

Leafing through postcards from early in the last century, cozy, hand- tinted pastels, and four black and white snapshots mixed in among vacation greetings from the heroic resorts of long ago:

a mass grave in a farmer’s field, with tight ranks for enlisted men on a slope below their officers, who lay above them with larger crosses behind whitewashed pickets;

also what appeared to be a farmstead bombarded by artillery rounds; a coal barge half-submerged in its haven; and a high street lined by rubble—somebody’s village,

though no people are in sight, only a few scorched plane trees milling about, stunned by calamity. That, I thought, must be France or Belgium, autumn of 1917.

I recalled, too, how, after the Great War, the young Harry Martinson worked as a day laborer shoveling brass bullet casings that clogged the the drainage ditches in Flanders.

each progressing along those same cobbled, muddy farm tracks aficionados affectionately refer to as le pavé. The countryside grown up now in lush pasture and impudent forest,

and everyone’s favorite colorful riders in the peloton moving in weird synchrony across the hills, fans sometimes becoming so unhinged from drinking the local beer, a few will strip naked

and I have watched them run in the mud alongside riders, shoving their bikes forward, shouting encouragement because they believe this will embolden their heroes and countrymen

to overcome the great pain so evident in their faces.

[ the diplomat's last discourse ]

Those pictures in the corner over there, by Herr Guttmann, we should look before we go. No masterworks, these. Guttmann. A typical name Jews invented when Joseph II, in a reforming mood, permitted them the rights of man, requiring only that they create their own German surnames, which turned out so much more beautiful than German surnames—they chose tree of roses, golden stones, starry fields, shining lake, blossom glow, and good man. . . . Here on the wall is a very small share of eternity a good man earned starving to death in the Lodz ghetto— Robert Guttmann, autodidact, born in Sušice, Southern Bohemia, avid Wandervogel and Zionist, an enthusiastic attendee of congresses for the future Utopia, a fanatical man, impervious to Weltschmerz, an innocent too, who, when deported on Transport A from Prague, 16 October 1941 appeared promptly at the platform carrying a small roll of canvas, in his valise a nub of graphite, his oils and brushes, because what else is necessary to keep alive even in your sixty-first year? Putting aside the absurdity of survival, those who are good, who are ethical, who always insist on acting morally, are naturally the first to die, death choosing them, who refuse to betray principles, even as others are quick to betrayed the same. The Golden Rule, distorted by the inversion of circumstances. And those of us alive today? Our world’s a criminal colony!

[ proverb ]

Parody is the ideology of slaves.

[ the trauma of Prague, the last discourse continued ]

Robert Guttmann, nostalgic for Prague, looking back, that is, from Hell or from Hell’s antechamber, did not summon nobility of soul latent in his character, nor achieve greatness. A ghastly painter, we might try to dignify his efforts with the terms art naïve, say he earnedoutsider status. This intimate little picture in oil, Kindling the Hanukah Candles, “is imbued with a tranquil family atmosphere on Sabbath.” Paradoxically, it was completed in 1941, after his arrest and deportation, a scene from Lodz, as dignified as reciting Kaddish before a gallows. Ain’t that a paradox? What are we going to say about it, Mr. Dobido? Contradictions force us to reconstruct the ends of things, praise what refuses stubbornly to give in, right to the end of it, the finale of evil being no finale at all, just another episode layered among layers. . . .How to account for sentimentality in his only other extant painting, Tyrolean Landscape— the Sublime rising from stone and ice and cool lush grasses of summer alpage? Here I apologize for a violence to decorum, and commit a violation of Godwin’s Law, as die Führer, too, in his formative years, painted the same sentimental song, Eine alte Naturlichkeit, O, alles ist blumen und kräuter! another almost-unknown-painter, once some hausfrau’s little darling in his confirmation dress, stood there, too, at the doors of this palace and stepped back from the dawn of the year 1914.

[ a short song ]

Behind that door a voice ordered the dreamer to close,

mothers ululate, pound fists against the mahogany panels,

a discord and dissonance composers will soon deploy

to vex us, behind that door devolves the spirit of our age,

behind that door aggrieved souls announce the arrival

of manifestos, greater velocities, conceptual pranks, alarms,

no contracts, no guarantees, electricity, only and always—

bivouac and acceleration.

[ the sense of something approaching ]

The frost hardening into veins of granite, heartwood of trees, the cries of snowbound elk. Under hazy sky, flurries, the dry snow drifting in the barrow pit, a haloed moon playing peekaboo through clouds. What leaves us returns. Twice every day across the mountains in the dark. Cold deepening its blue resolve, the ice flows groaning against the tired pilings of a bridge.

[ on intermediacy ]

I too tried to live like a dung beetle, mastering hardships of hunger, of cold, and dark, calling punishment purifying, growing so ferocious in in my mind people feared me

as I sang to myself on summer nights, foraging boletus and berries... One spring, returning north from Mexico, I rode the train, snow falling so heavily the playa seems intimate,

distances vanished, the horizon narrowed, and I caught a glimpse of another man stooped inside a culvert under a road, waiting out the storm a 100 miles south of Salt Lake

and hours later, as I changed before dinner, I watched the TV bolted to the motel wall as police dragged a man from his car and beat him to death with clubs,

the grainy video looped a dozen times, the victim on his knees pleading “Please, no more.” At dinner I asked my hosts: “By what privilege is is one man granted a private death and the other not?”

And later: “To what degree does curiosity, the unwillingness to avert our eyes, differ from the complicity of witness?” By the time they served sauterne, I knew I should not have returned.

And when I woke the next day, pulling open the curtains, it seemed worse—the spring blizzard had left the mountain groves of aspen covered in white,

the valleys mottled by broken sunlight, intensely cold at dawn.

[ Hobo Blues ]

…the curve of her own life, passed close enough to mine, I heard her singing from the falls, from falls heard her sing, empty empty empty,

nameless and alone, she lived all summer alone across the lake in a grove, a grove of stones, and each evening she told the same, I won't come back,

not according to anyone’s plan. At solstice, I lay on spongy ground and stared up at bright Vega, stared as sun and moon intersected trails

and peepers, nighthawks, and crickets all ceased their loud love-making, and mute thunderstorms erupted, in branches of light that burst

in long arcs over foothills, but these were not signs of anything she felt compelled to obey. Obey she could not, refusing

to abandon her seclusion, swim with ease across the water, climb ashore, combing weeds from her long, tangled hair:

Every day I remake a boundary between us, and across the verge of our two worlds, gravity will never seize me, nor your hand grab hold.

[ armistice, note to Woodrow Wilson ]

In the village of W— just a few abandoned buildings surrounded now by weedy fields— people were out digging potatoes when news arrived that the war in Europe ended the day before, and allowed themselves one evening of respite between epidemics of polio and influenza, one night when everyone gathered after chores and it was “truly a wonderful thing,” one woman wrote in her journal, “hearing the mill whistle shriek six miles downriver, knowing my brother would come home from the war.” That shrill joy: she left no record that he ever did.

[ the hobo, sotto voce ]

I’ve lost track of people. My youngest son, already grown, tried once to summon me back, as they used to in Russian novels, believing nostalgia a stronger force than a man’s estrangements, he spoke my name in each of the seven directions across the mountain ranges that divide our world: Dear father, it’s the happiest time of year again, when, overnight, it seems the season changed. It’s true. Last night, the first storm gathered against the peaks, descended over the lake, wet moraine, departed by dawn, ice glazing whitebark pines. I’ve kept his words close for 20 years and carried his name within me like a bag of rice and bouillon, dry strips of meat, the flask that forgets the vault of heaven, the oppressive immensity of it. How is it possible now, dearest one, after decades of drought, and all I loved lost, I still feel this odd gratitude return each morning I climb across the alpine tundra, taste its frozen berries dense with sugar, and then climb higher for no reason along a narrow, sawtooth ridge dusted by snow, overwhelmed by the immediacy of other lives, small but intensely present as your last words to me, stubborn as crickets chirring in swaths of fleeceflower burnt red by the fires of early frost, crickets dying satisfied by the bounty of trail-side dung. Tomorrow, I turn north again, the cardinal point I’ve travelled toward all my life, believing that, on its most remote peak, compelled to answer you, I will find words as unambiguous as this first cold mass of autumn air. A double happiness? Conjured— despite our ineluctable distances— by what your words intended to summon,Where have you gone, father? Will you forgive me, son?

Wallowa Mountains 1993-2013

David Axelrod is the author of seven previous collections of poetry and one collection of creative non-fiction. He is the editor recently of Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poetry of Walter Pavlich, forthcoming from Lynx House Press. A new collection of poems, The Open Hand, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in About Place, American Poetry Journal, Cape Rock, Cascadia Review, Cloudbank, Fogged Clarity, The Hopper, Hubbub, Miramar, Southern Poetry Review, and Stringtown, among others.